I finally got my hands on an iPhone 4S. I upgraded my iPhone 4 contract at the O2 Store in Cribbs Causeway here in Bristol on Saturday. Fortunately, I didn’t have to queue very long to get one!
Before buying it, I headed off to the Apple Store to check Siri out. I was interested in checking it out before I bought the phone, because I wanted to evaluate if it can pick up my accent. I’m not a native english speaker, therefore, several voice recognition engines in the past have failed for me. I was surprised that Siri worked a 100% for me.
I’ve been experimenting with Siri since Saturday, and I have to say that mostly it has impressed me. Although, here in the UK, the capabilities of Siri are slightly more limited than in the US. It doesn’t do anything related to Maps, business and address searches. Also, I’m surprised that it doesn’t understand the word “tweet”, “iMessage” and so on (Its surprising since both technologies are part of the iOS 5, so at least it should understand that). Nevertheless since its “beta” I’ll ignore these shortcomings for now.
The beauty of Siri for me, is the capability of translating human speech into API calls. (e.g. “Do I need an umbrella” translates to a query for checking the weather, remind me to fix this code when I get to work translates into a geotagged reminder etc..). I’ve been thinking about the implications of this and the they are profound indeed. I’m sure, Apple, is considering of opening up Siri to third party application developers. I look forward to saying to Siri “calculate me a route between Paddington to Knightbridge via the underground”, after which it should open a Tube Underground app and have to route plotted for me. Similarly, if I ask when is the next bus at a particular station, it should give me a schedule of the upcoming buses at that particular bus station. All this kind of integration does require help from third parties however, I can’t envision how such integration would be achieved, as the potential for conflicts is significant.
The situation of where Siri is going in future will certainly be more clear by the time the next iPhone is announced. One thing, I don’t get however, is why Siri is not available on other iOS devices. One reason touted is that it requires the extra processing power available on the iPhone 4S. However, I’m not exactly sure thats true, since I’ve seen that its response time is directly proportional to my internet connectivity. If my phone is in airplane mode for example I get this:
Apparently Siri sends off data to some server for remote processing before it formulates its response. Therefore, the need for extra local processing power is mitigated. So, why is there no Siri for other iOS devices?
